Confessions Of A Pastor

Confessions Of A Pastor

I have been doing a bunch of reading on “Post Adrenal Crash”.   Pastors are adrenaline addicts.  We work 80 hrs a week, deal with conflict, broken lives, study, dreaming, misconceptions, and our own sin.  Last year I learned a lot about myself.  I went to school full-time, played collegiate baseball, and planted a church while having our third son (we now have 4 boys).  After I finished the school year I went into a deep depression as my adrenal glands said, “ I hate you, and I will produce no more adrenaline.”  It has taken me close to 6 months to recover as I realized something was wrong.  I began to read some of Archibold Hart’s stuff and realized I had become an adrenaline addict.  I goes like this: work all week, preach on Sunday, get home and feel horrible, go mountain biking and go off extreme jumps, or surfing big waves, or self-medicating to get that feeling to go away. 

I have since learned to welcome the crash.  It’s not God moving away from me, it’s my body that God designed saying you need to sleep.  So I took the advice.  One day I got home after preaching on Sunday, and I went to sleep, and stayed asleep until Tuesday morning.  I have never felt better.  Sabbath is meant for man, not man for the Sabbath.  God has blessed us with bodies that speak to us.  We need to listen.  Pastors need to realize they are fragile people like everyone else. Pastors experience burnout more than any other “profession”.  Pastor’s who are to be working in the power of the Lord often violate rest because they don’t believe it’s God’s work.  Temporary atheism.